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The MercurySteam dev goes on to attribute blame to Alvarez, claiming that the studio's QA department is "treated like cattle, with shameful wages and almost everyday bullying" and the game's art direction is "erratic and beheaded." It's alleged that this is down to the studio director's "distrust" of his workers.
"If there’s someone to blame here, that’s Enric Álvarez. He is the person who has led a broken development based on his personal criteria, completely overlooking programmers, designers and artists," the anonymous employee added. "Despite his nice look to the press, often considered as some sort of creative ‘visionary’ in the looks of David Cage and Molyneux, this guy has serious problems. He is a mean and naughty guy, and since the 'success Lords of Shadows 1' his ego has grown to the point of not even daring to say 'hello' when you meet him in the hallway.
Meh, you can emulate the DS easily. Anyway I've tried the MoF demo on 3DS and found it inferior in all aspect to all the gay Nintendo toys titles I played before. Not bad, just mediocre and not worth the money Nintendo was asking for it. If it is €10 on Steam I'd go for it.
Because they are all related in the direct line and No.1 is actually the same person as No.5 (Alucard a.k.a. Trevor Belmont) and No.2 is No.3 (Gabriel post/pre vampirisation)? I mean it's probably the artist being lazy, but that would be the reasoning.
So, did the devs ressurected Tony Jay or What? There is a voice in the castle that talks "where do you think you're going",that reminds me of the same line in the game Legacy of Kain:Defiance. And next thing you see is a fuckhueg squid like boss, and i instantly reminded myself of the Elder God of LoK. So far, so awesome. It's not faster paced like Revengeance, but i like it.
And the previous boss, a demon acolyte of Satan is a fucking lizardman
Hey Tehdagah just posting in this thread to let you know you and those other guys were wrong, wrong, wrong as I expected and perhaps you should hold your tongue in the future before accusing someone of lying. That's all I'm saying on the matter, peace.
Hey Tehdagah just posting in this thread to let you know you and those other guys were wrong, wrong, wrong as I expected and perhaps you should hold your tongue in the future before accusing someone of lying. That's all I'm saying on the matter, peace.
She probably didn't found a vampire killing a (female)child behind the scenes worth mentioning. She also didn't mention that the man tried to protect his family,and Dracula kills him with a counterattack. Even when she is factually partially right, she is wrong with her obvious feminist rose glasses. there is no rape imagery in a scene where a vampire sucks the blood of a woman, and it certainly it didn't make me remind of some obscure doujin hentai game... Oh wait, i remember that the woman turn herself old when he sucks her blood, maybe it's an allusion for a pumped and dumped whore?
Hey Tehdagah just posting in this thread to let you know you and those other guys were wrong, wrong, wrong as I expected and perhaps you should hold your tongue in the future before accusing someone of lying. That's all I'm saying on the matter, peace.
Definitly going to buy this now. It's a shame about the development( and this doesn't exactly make me big on Mercury/Alvarez as a developer), but the game is getting lots of praise and I don't trust braindead reviewers in the first place.
Especially if I read things like this
Beat the infamous 'hedge maze' part that all the reviewers hated last night.
No joke, beat it on the second attempt. Took all of ~3 minutes. I assume that the reviewer had his head firmly up his ass and didn't use an ability he unlocked just beforehand.
That maze works like this. There are leaves on the ground. If you step on them, the creature hears it and runs to you and you fail. There are bells on the wall at certain places, if you throw daggers at them they attract the creature. When the creature isn't running to a noise source, he slowly walks toward your position(smells you or something). You have a mist form that lets you pass over the leaves, but it is very slow, recharges slowly and runs out quickly. You can stop on leaves, but if you move (jump, throw daggers, anything other than mist form I think) it makes noise. There are rails on most of the walls you can climb on, but at many places there are leaves on the wall to, so it makes noise when you climb there.
The whole thing is a big trial and error, you have to find a perfect (or very lucky) route. Another great piece of design is that when you fail, you lose a little health and start again. When you lose all your health, you get Game Over, and then start again.
When you pass it, you get a boss battle where you mop the floor with him.
I passed it in about 20 minutes, but found it VERY frustrating. They really should have given the option to skip these sections or make them trivial (like the original did with puzzles).
(It was 20 very angry minutes for me, if I'm wrong about something, someone please correct me.)
Definitly going to buy this now. It's a shame about the development( and this doesn't exactly make me big on Mercury/Alvarez as a developer), but the game is getting lots of praise and I don't trust braindead reviewers in the first place.
Especially if I read things like this
Beat the infamous 'hedge maze' part that all the reviewers hated last night.
No joke, beat it on the second attempt. Took all of ~3 minutes. I assume that the reviewer had his head firmly up his ass and didn't use an ability he unlocked just beforehand.
That maze works like this. There are leaves on the ground. If you step on them, the creature hears it and runs to you and you fail. There are bells on the wall at certain places, if you throw daggers at them they attract the creature. When the creature isn't running to a noise source, he slowly walks toward your position(smells you or something). You have a mist form that lets you pass over the leaves, but it is very slow, recharges slowly and runs out quickly. You can stop on leaves, but if you move (jump, throw daggers, anything other than mist form I think) it makes noise. There are rails on most of the walls you can climb on, but at many places there are leaves on the wall to, so it makes noise when you climb there.
The whole thing is a big trial and error, you have to find a perfect (or very lucky) route. Another great piece of design is that when you fail, you lose a little health and start again. When you lose all your health, you get Game Over, and then start again.
When you pass it, you get a boss battle where you mop the floor with him.
I passed it in about 20 minutes, but found it VERY frustrating. They really should have given the option to skip these sections or make them trivial (like the original did with puzzles).
(It was 20 very angry minutes for me, if I'm wrong about something, someone please correct me.)
You don't see the whole maze from where you start. You can head in one direction, find that there is leaves on the wall so you can't climb, your mist form is recharging, the creature is closing in, and the only bell you can ring is right next to you. And you have to be quick too, because the creature is slowly walking toward you. If he sees you, your only chance is mist form, but it only lasts a few seconds(and is probably recharging anyway) so you can't get far.
edit:
Also, it's not really a maze, more like a garden with big blocks or something.
Finished the game. Amazing action game. Great combat, nice challange, gorgeous art direction, a fuckload of bossfights. The modern city is not that bad, it's just that the castle realm is really gorgeous. Stealth sections are nonsensical(the last boss should be a Golgoth Guard), but they are a far cry from being "frustrating", and they are really short. I liked the maze and completed it without the mist form(better stealth than thiaf). Satan was kinda disappointing(his design and the final battle). Another case of a game loved by the public and panned by reviewers(wish is odd, since this game is really stable and bug free).
Finished it. Decent enough, but compared to the first one in almost every way, save combat. Quick thoughts, because the not-so-quick ones spiraled into a 2500+ word mess.
-Combat is good. The Gabe-ula feels really fluid this time around. Lots of cancel-friendly animations, little in the way of showy recovery frames for attacks, and MOTHERFUCKING MIST FORM make it a real pleasure to shred enemies as the lord of the night.
-Not burying useful attacks behind long input strings was a good idea, though implementing dodge offset would have been an even better idea. Without dodge offset, long strings are either suicide or indicative of braindead enemies that allow you to fuck them up for 6-10 moves while doing nothing to counterattack. Some games (well....really just Ninja Gaiden Black/2) happen to work them in well, but that's probably beyond Mercury Steam, even though they do seem like the Western studio that "gets" these types of games more than others.
-I love the dodge dash carrying hit-conformation properties (no damage though). Makes up for how it goes too far and gives Gabriel a much-needed zoning technique.
-Better balance in general. Gone are the broken subweapons and ultimate techniques of the first game that trivialized practically everything but the DLC boss who was built specifically to be immune to them. The broken grab moves and Holy Jump, which demolished most regular enemies that weren't wargs/spiders/coffins are gone too. The dark crystal makes a return, but is much more a pain to assemble.
-Mist form. Best thing in the game besides maybe one other thing (up next). Can cancel practically anything into it and become immune to physical attacks. Very useful given that the prevalence of unblockable techniques makes sync-blocking relatively useless as a means of aggressive defense.
-QTEs can be turned off entirely. Fuck yes.
-Enemies are very aggressive and have a heapload of techniques. Things like Dungeon Jailers, Brotherhood Priests, and Dark Monks are particularly detailed and well thought out.
*Jailers are heavy foes with armored fronts. You can either expend Chaos magic to destroy their armor or get behind them. They attack with their clubs, utilize grabs, and can charge at the player character. They'll often throw out rolling balls that not only deal damage to Gabe if he's struck by them, but are also deploying lines of black powder that the Jailer can light aflame to add a battlefield hazard. They also seem to modify the AI of Dungeon Minions in the encounter and can throw or roll them at the player.
*Brotherhood Priests have a bevy of magic and physical attacks they employ against the player character. They can also teleport around and summon in Brotherhood Soldiers. The priests can apply a gold or silver incantation to a soldier which grant immunities to physical attacks and make all of their attacks unblockable, respectively.
*Dark Monks have a handful of physical attacks as well as a couple different kinds of ranged magicks. An individual monk is capable of laying down destructible portals that spawn Possessed Citizens. More Monks working in concert can create more sturdy portals. Enough Monks in one encounter can float high in the air, perform an incantation, and merge into a floating demon avatar of fire that can either be stopped with ice magic, or fought to damage/stun the Monks.
-Some enemies are a little too aggressive. Shotgun, machine-gun, and grenade-gun Possessed have a penchant for spamming attacks from poor camera angles with little to no audio cues. These attacks are surprisingly damaging, hitting for more damage than anything even endgame bosses can hit for.
-Bosses are mostly great. There's only a couple of puzzle bosses, but even those two are a lot less linear than those in something like God of War. Most fights are straight-up slugfests against a foe with a lot of techniques and health.
Victor, the Riders of the Storm, and Zobek/Death really stand out.
-Unfortunately, the final boss sucks. It's not a gimmick fight, but the devs went completely overboard on visual effects and audio. You can barely see nor hear what's going on. Really messy. Also very anti-climactic.
-Stealth sections are ass. They aren't hard, but they aren't really fun either. Very restricted in what you can do.
-Platforming is mostly shit. The loss of the Combat Cross and it's grappling/swinging/rappelling abilities really took out much of the interesting elements from the first game. Only one section really takes advantage of the double jump upgrade to do something interesting.
-A dearth of interesting puzzles. There's basically two in the entire game, with the rest replaced by shitty stealth/rat sections.
-Metroidvania style open world is terrible. You can't sequence-break in a linear, story-driven game which defeats most of the fun of Metroid-style gameworlds. There's also nothing interesting to find besides boring upgrades and unlocks for really gimmicky combat trials. Even Lament of Innocence and Curse of Darkness had some hidden boss fights and meaningful upgrades to reward exploration. An awful map, inability to replay sections of content easily, and an abundance of in-game loading screens (elevators, decontamination chambers, etc) all add to what a bad idea this was.
-Environments in the castle are good, but the city is kind of lacking. It's better than plenty of shit that was praised to high heaven by game journos, but not nearly as pretty as locales in the first game.
-Story is okay. They managed to do something rather nuanced and complex without it being a total trainwreck. The Gabe-ula definitely could have used more lines where he could show some passion, but at least they didn't write him as someone like Donte.
-The "controversial scene" is fucking retarded, especially in the context of the story at large. Cheap marketing ploy a la "No Russian" in Call of Duty.
-Good characterization on some of the minor players in the story. I especially liked Raisa and Nergal. Showed a lot of personality in very few lines.
-Weak ending sequence that screams DLC. So do the strange doors in the city/castle made up of hands that, mysteriously, can't ever be interacted with. Calling it, Space Crocodile DLC for $9.99 where you go into a dimensional void to fight some "bigger-than-Satan" evil.
Or they'll be portals to Hell so there can be an actual satisfying final boss fight with Satan. Yeah, possessing Alucard was pretty bastardly, but it seems a waste of the "Roid-ifer" model that MercurySteam made for the Prince of Hell. Guy was swole as all hell. Pumped some serious iron after tapping out to the tag-team of Gabriel and God in the first game.
-Weak ending sequence that screams DLC. So do the strange doors in the city/castle made up of hands that, mysteriously, can't ever be interacted with. Calling it, Space Crocodile DLC for $9.99 where you go into a dimensional void to fight some "bigger-than-Satan" evil.
Given that these games are combat centric i think LoS2 is the better game overall. I agree that the exploration is bad, but if you play the game following the quest compass like the first one, it's not much different... Hope there is a DLC were you can fight a Golgoth Guard...
compared to the first one in almost every way, save combat. Quick thoughts, because the not-so-quick ones spiraled into a 2500+ word mess. 
